WTF Is It Now?!?

Schadenfreude
Or: fuck you, assholes!

Cool. The Kitty Kelley tell-all, the Bush AWOL scandal, and Cheney-the-terrorist. Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove must be close to hysterics today.

A disgraceful campaign speech

There is a danger that we'll be hit again no matter who is elected president this November, as pResident Bush himself has said on many occasions. The danger might be a bit less if the current administration had chosen to spend less on tax cuts for the wealthy and more on protecting our ports, securing nuclear materials in Russia and establishing an enforceable immigration policy that would keep better track of people who enter the country from abroad.

- from a NY Times editorial.

Cheney spits toads

Mr. Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and pResident Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11. Think of what brass-knuckled Republicans could have made of a 9/11 tape of an uncertain Democratic president giving a shaky statement that looked like a hostage tape and flying randomly from air base to air base, as the veep ordered that planes be shot down. The Bush crowd played down terrorism because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger had told their successors that Osama was a priority, and the Bushies scorned all things Clinton. The president shrugged off intelligence briefings with such headlines as "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' because there was brush to be cleared and unaffordable tax-cutting to be done.

- Maureen Dowd.

Somewhere, Joe McCarthy smiled

Iraq is a mess. And Cheney is one of the chief architects of that mess - pride of place after Bush himself. But rather than answer for what they have done, they both prefer to resort to odious scare tactics, an updated version of the old soft-on-communism charge. Even before McCarthy, this was standard stuff in politics. As Cheney knows, when you don't have any answers, it's best not to have any shame, either.

- Richard Cohen.